Book excerpt: The industry’s most complete, useful, and up-to-date guide to SQL Server 2014. You’ll find start-to-finish coverage of SQL Server’s core database server and management capabilities: all the real-world information, tips, guidelines, and examples you’ll need to install, monitor, maintain, and optimize the most complex database environments. The provided examples and sample code provide plenty of hands-on opportunities to learn more about SQL Server and create your own viable solutions. Four leading SQL Server experts present deep practical insights for administering SQL Server, analyzing and optimizing queries, implementing data warehouses, ensuring high availability, tuning performance, and much more. You will benefit from their behind-the-scenes look into SQL Server, showing what goes on behind the various wizards and GUI-based tools. You’ll learn how to use the underlying SQL commands to fully unlock the power and capabilities of SQL Server. Writing for all intermediate-to-advanced-level SQL Server professionals, the authors draw on immense production experience with SQL Server. Throughout, they focus on successfully applying SQL Server 2014’s most powerful capabilities and its newest tools and features. Detailed information on how to... Understand SQL Server 2014’s new features and each edition’s capabilities and licensing Install, upgrade to, and configure SQL Server 2014 for better performance and easier management Streamline and automate key administration tasks with Smart Admin Leverage powerful new backup/restore options: flexible backup to URL, Managed Backup to Windows Azure, and encrypted backups Strengthen security with new features for enforcing “least privilege” Improve performance with updateable columnstore indexes, Delayed Durability, and other enhancements Execute queries and business logic more efficiently with memoryoptimized tables, buffer pool extension, and natively-compiled stored procedures Control workloads and Disk I/O with the Resource Governor Deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances to achieve enterprise-class availability and disaster recovery Apply new Business Intelligence improvements in Master Data Services, data quality, and Parallel Data Warehouse